Impunity must end

Monday, 29 November 2021 00:33 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

It is becoming almost farcical now how often in this very column we broach the subject of Police brutality and a culture of impunity in Sri Lanka.

The latest incident that has been flagged is the killing of yet another suspect in Police custody. The incident in question is particularly astonishing as it had come after the Bar Association of Sri Lanka, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and a senior figure from the Executive had all contacted the Police in seeking to prevent this injustice from occurring.

All three communications had in plain English warned that the suspect in Police custody, H.L. Lasantha alias Tinkering Lasantha, who had been apprehended by the officers of the Kalutara Divisional Criminal Investigation Bureau, would be killed in custody by the Police under the pretext of it happening during a shootout whilst being taken to show weapons.

To almost no one’s surprise, on Friday morning, the media reported that the suspect had been shot dead while being taken to recover a hidden weapons cache. While this stock-in-trade Police answer for custodial deaths has become the butt of many a joke on social media, it is quite frankly no laughing matter.

While one or two could be written off as coincidence, the sobering reality is that incidents of Police brutality take place pretty frequently in Sri Lanka. In 2009, Parliament was informed that for eight months, 32 people had died in Police custody. A further 26 people had died in Police custody in 2008.

Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch highlighted how Police abuse and brutality in Sri Lanka had surged amid the COVID-19 pandemic and called for the Government to restore independent oversight of the Police, while also investigating the alleged abuses.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) says 90% of their torture complaints are against the Police, with hundreds of cases being reported each year. In 2015, it was 420 cases, in 2016, 450 cases, and in 2017, there were 380 cases.

All these instances and many others point to Police brutality being a systemic problem in Sri Lanka. Police are routinely protected with transfers and other slap-on-the-wrist punishments. For decades, the State of Emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act provided them with often blanket legal and political protection. The institutionalised impunity was never rolled back despite the conflict ending more than a decade ago.

Minorities, the poor and the disabled are among the most vulnerable due to this continued impunity and lack of sensitisation.

But this is not just a Sri Lankan problem; the entire ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the US was borne out of, yes, systemic racism against African Americans, but also a culture of impunity amongst law enforcement.

And this does not merely stop with the Police, the Army in several parts of Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka have been known to ill-treat the public – most recently the alleged abuse suffered by a photo journalist merely looking to take a picture of road sign.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa talks about a disciplined society, however, that will never be the case if the people fear those enlisted to protect them more than those that they are supposedly being protected from.